What is Adobe Experience Manager?

If you currently work in marketing for a large organization, it is likely that your company either uses Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to manage its website and other digital channels or is in the process of migrating to AEM. AEM is a WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get) content management system that allows content to be published easily to all your digital channels consistently. These channels can include websites, apps, signage, social, voice and many more, which come together to create cohesive, yet personalized experiences.

Why AEM?

There is no shortage of content management systems (CMS) out there, so why are so many companies now using AEM?

One of the key reasons is the plethora of Adobe applications that integrate seamlessly with AEM to create unified campaigns, such as Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign. These applications are all great tools that each help manage content in their own way. And when they all work together, you get content that reaches your audience across a number of channels conveying the same brand and message.

AEM Modules

AEM is comprised of five modules that work together to manage marketing content and assets easily:

Sites – Creates and manages site content on an array of platforms with responsive designs to ensure unified experiences.
Assets – Facilitates asset management through creation, review and approval workflows, automated tag and metadata assignment and asset integration.
Mobile – Builds mobile applications on multiple platforms with one codebase using the same content as your site, and handles things like app analytics and push notifications to enhance user experience.
Forms – Creates forms customized to the individual user using properties like location, device and profile, and saves user inputs (even on partially completed forms) securely.
Communities – Manages user communities, including blogs, reviews and forums, and integrates social feeds into your site.

Manage your content without worrying about layout

Another thing that sets AEM apart from others is its ability to separate content from structure. It organizes content into what it calls Content Fragments that assemble text and images that go together, but not in any specific structure. You can still define any number of templates to publish content, but then use the same defined Content Fragment with each unique template. For example, you may want to have the desktop version of an event listing contain event details as well as a description and artist information, while also having the mobile version contain only event details to save on space. With content fragments, you can use the same fragment to populate both versions.

This separation of content from layout can also simplify the workflow. Instead of having to pass projects back and forth to ensure all your content fits well with how it is organized and vice versa, you can split the work between content authors and template authors for a smoother process.

Handle assets all in one place

When your company has a lot of digital assets to manage, it can be a real headache trying to keep track of everything. Luckily, AEM has the tools to simplify this process across your team. For example, Adobe Creative Cloud can sync all your assets with AEM so that any changes you make will automatically update in the CMS. But what if you want to revert to a previous version of the asset? No problem – enabling asset versioning can restore assets to a previous state.

It sports features like smart tags, which go through all your images and videos and assign metadata using Adobe Sensei AI. It trains its recognition algorithm against your tag structure and business taxonomy, but can also be edited manually and save you the time of having to generate tags from scratch.

Furthermore, smart crops uses the same technology to automatically crop single images or groups of images in logical ways for different sizes and customer profiles, but can also be changed manually as needed.

Equip your team with a personalization toolbelt

Leveraging all of the Adobe tools at your fingertips is the key to unlocking unique user experiences.

Starting with Adobe Campaign, you can reach out to your audience with content that is customized to each platform, screen size, and context. Each variation can contain information relevant to a specific segment or customer profile that will make the most sense for each user to start their digital experience.

From these campaigns, you can then make use of Adobe Analytics to better understand your users. AI and machine learning collect customer insights beyond page views and clicks. Analytics implements of system of attribution values that weighs touch points and more thoroughly tracks and analyzes customer journeys. It also looks at journeys from other channels to paint an even clearer picture.

This is where Adobe Target steps in. With your fleshed out customer profiles, you can start building a truly custom experience. Adobe Target uses Adobe Sensei to understand user patterns with every interaction and delivers personalized content by executing a mixture of practices that you implement manually and those based on machine learning algorithms.

Make each user’s experience special

Rich Media is all about creating personal digital experiences. Let us help you integrate Adobe Experience Manager into your website, interactive tool or other digital applications so that you can provide content and services that your customers really want.